Increase Instagram Followers With These 10 Tips for Photographers

With the news that Instagram has now reached 300 million active daily users, we’re reminded of its importance as part of a photographer’s overall marketing plan.

For our studio, Lin & Jirsa, we try our best to track the source of leads. More and more, our leads are coming directly from Instagram, with about 15 leads (of the 300+ booked for this year) being traced directly to the social media giant. Of course, there are also the untraced leads that may have originated from IG in addition to the leads that IG may have assisted in convincing and converting.

So how does a photographer start building a following? Here are 10 tips to consider:

1. Start with your immediate network – Nobody likes to drink at an empty bar. While you never want to be “that annoying friend” that continually markets his business to his friends, a subtle “follow” from your business account is absolutely acceptable and establishes a foundation to build upon.

2. Interact with Your Target Audience – This one deserves a long explanation, so we’ll cover this in the next article. In short, participate on Instagram with your target audience, following them, commenting on their posts, and liking their posts rather than only interacting with your current network. This involves strategies like following the followers of your fellow industry professionals and even competitors. Again, we’ll cover this in detail in a later article.

3. Schedule Your Posts – Posting consistently can be difficult and time-consuming. That’s why it’s worth paying for a post scheduler. As much as we all hate additional monthly service fees, in this case, the investment is worth the time saved, and the consistency gained.

The following was also a very successful post. It fits the qualities of “Amazing” because of the unique location and the photography tricks applied. But it’s also relevant and intimate since it’s actually from my very own engagement session.

A photo posted by Lin & Jirsa Photography (@linandjirsa) on May 10, 2016 at 9:02pm PDT

5. Post Consistent Content – What do you want your Instagram feed to be known for? If someone said “Check out this account! It has great ___________,” what would you want that blank to be for your account?

We recently did a full workshop with Caroline Tran in which she teaches everything about her business from shooting film, to posing and lighting, to marketing and social media (Workshop Link). In her social media section, she talks about how important it is to curate your photos and show a consistent style. Below is an screenshot of her account.

Clients tend to book what they see, so maintaining a specific style lets them know what to expect, and lets you know exactly what to deliver.

Of course, the degree to which you make your feed consistent is a business choice that should depend on your style, niche, and audience. At Lin and Jirsa, for example, we have decided to show more diversity in shooting, lighting, and post production styles simply because we know that our clientele is so diverse in their style preferences, and we do our best to accommodate.

6. Use Your Account Sparingly for Marketing Sales and Products – Sometimes people use their accounts to over-market themselves. “Yes, we know you have mini-sessions going on! We don’t need a reminder post every two hours!” But more often than not, photographers underutilize Instagram for marketing. Don’t be afraid to announce a mini-session or subtly showcase/market your new albums or canvases.

7. Don’t focus all success on numbers – Related to the last point, some posts will do better than others and THAT’S OKAY! You don’t have to aim for hundreds or thousands of likes with every post. If your post on your new albums only receives 1/4 of the engagement as your regular posts, it doesn’t mean you should stop posting them, especially if they are leading to sales. Just use your judgement by using the numbers to help you make decisions, without being a slave to them.

8. Find the best times to post – You can use paid services like Iconosquare to track pertinent stats, including the best times to post, engagement, and follower growth over time. However, you can also use your intuition and think about when your users are most likely to be engaged with your content. For our Instagram account, it happens to be 8AM, 12PM, 5PM and 8PM. You can also use best practices based on mass data like this.

*We understand the Instagram’s Business Profiles and tools are arriving soon, so we’ll keep you posted when they do and how they work.
9. Integrate with Facebook – In this Web Marketing and SEO book we stress the importance of time-saving workflows. If you’re posting manually from your mobile device to Instagram, you should also consider linking your Facebook account so that images post directly to your timeline as well. Besides, the Facebook algorithm loves Instagram posts.

10. Learn how to use Hashtags, Tagging and Locations – This may seem fairly obvious but I still see many photographers not using or misusing all three.

Hashtags – Get into the conversation by finding popular and unique hashtags that cater to your specific audience. What hashtags are being used by your target audience and future clients?

Tip: Put a list of 30 maximum hashtags in your first comment rather than cluttering your caption space. Having a paragraph as a caption takes away attention from the image.

Tagging – Be sure to tag your clients, models, and all vendors involved in the shoot!

Locations – Be sure to add a location to your image so that anyone searching that location will see your work!

Conclusion

The last bit of advice is to remember that every business is different, including yours. So make sure you don’t do something just because you hear of others doing it, including the advice given in this article. With any social network, being genuine and being yourself is important to attracting and retaining engaged followers. So have fun, develop your own voice, and come up with your own strategy.

Did we miss anything? What works for you? We’d love to know in the comments

Q&A Discussions

This is Nice Tips! I tried Your tips and Let’s see if we can get interaction from users. However, I have also purchased Instagram Followers from Alwaysviral and it works out like a charm, they do provide 24*7 online support, however, I never needed this 24*7 support because their services are too good.

I will recommend everyone to use Alwaysviral website to boost their profiles. I Purchased 2k Instagram Followers from them and got pretty good appreciation.

Thanks for you article! There are a lot of really good tips, I haven’t tried earlier to put my location marker, hope it will help! And I also wanted to ask what do you think about bots? Is it dangerous to use them? My sister started a business selling handmade jewelry and she uses bigbangram.com to boost her followers’ activity and attract more customers, and she also uses hashtag generator from the same company bigbangram.com/hashtag-generator (you can read about it in their blog https://bigbangram.com/blog). She is happy about it, though I doubt using any other services to increase the number of your followers. What do you think? Has any of you tried it?

Amazing Articles! I have tried Your tips and it didn’t worked quite well for me and it took too much time to gain more followers so i decided to go for paid ones and i have found a website QQSUMO and purchased followers,likes and views from them and you will not believe it worked for me and now i only boost my all social media profiles from QQSUMO.They provide 2 years of replacement protection on each of there services and 24*7 online support. Even You Can Try their Services. Visit QQSUMO Website or search QQSUMO on Google.

Thanks for the sharing the article.Six months back I started using Instagram and I wanted followers on my
profile but I used to get one or two followers in a week and sometimes none at
all. For the love I have for Instagram I started searching for best automation
tool for Instagram and as a result I found wizboost com. Wizboost is
by far the best tool that someone can ever use for automating their likes,
commenting and followers and it can even unfollow too.

Thank you for the article! The advice is really good. But I think that at the moment even profiles with the most beautiful photos are used by bots. Even I use bot bigbangram.com, with it I have real followers.

Finding the best time to post is very important because time is everything. If you are looking for more methods to get followers on Instagram from GetInstaFollow.com. They have a huge user group, people follow each other on Instagram and will also like each other’s Instagram posts.

Some people use apps to get more followers faster.
It’s good for businesses like my brother does with instanobel.com as I
remember. But they need to gain audience faster to start making money. My
opinion is if you really want to get more followers as fast as possible such
tips are pretty good for you

Sorry, I’ve gotta call BS on some of this. Instagram is a numbers game and the @linandjirsa feed is a great example of this. It gets 500-1k likes per picture because it has 42k followers. It has 42k followers because they’re FOLLOWING 7k people. And this is where the numbers break down and reveal the truth about some feeds. Why is an account with 42k followers only getting 500 likes and 5 comments per picture? It’s either A) because they paid for ghost followers, or B) they subscribe to the smoke & mirrors approach of “follow for follow” and most of their followers are also following 7k other people which makes it impossible to engage with the feeds you follow. There’s no way somebody who is following 7k people is keeping up with everything in their feed, which means that as a follower you are not engaging, or even ever seeing, hardly anything from those you follow. Well it works both ways, which is why you can only eke out 500 likes from 42k followers. Nobody seems to write about that part.

A few things to keep in mind: 1) we can’t control what accounts follow us .. so if someone was using services like instagress and followed us based on the hashtags we used, then yes they are not likely to interact with our content and will drive our follower count up but keep our engagement low 2) the IG algorithm is not showing our images to all of our followers 3) we have never bought followers – and would not be dumb enough to do so because of the risks involved 4) you are correct in that you can’t engage with 7K followers AND following others with interests similar to your target audience is a growth strategy

Course Progression

Q&A Discussions

This is Nice Tips! I tried Your tips and Let’s see if we can get interaction from users. However, I have also purchased Instagram Followers from Alwaysviral and it works out like a charm, they do provide 24*7 online support, however, I never needed this 24*7 support because their services are too good.

I will recommend everyone to use Alwaysviral website to boost their profiles. I Purchased 2k Instagram Followers from them and got pretty good appreciation.

Thanks for you article! There are a lot of really good tips, I haven’t tried earlier to put my location marker, hope it will help! And I also wanted to ask what do you think about bots? Is it dangerous to use them? My sister started a business selling handmade jewelry and she uses bigbangram.com to boost her followers’ activity and attract more customers, and she also uses hashtag generator from the same company bigbangram.com/hashtag-generator (you can read about it in their blog https://bigbangram.com/blog). She is happy about it, though I doubt using any other services to increase the number of your followers. What do you think? Has any of you tried it?

Amazing Articles! I have tried Your tips and it didn’t worked quite well for me and it took too much time to gain more followers so i decided to go for paid ones and i have found a website QQSUMO and purchased followers,likes and views from them and you will not believe it worked for me and now i only boost my all social media profiles from QQSUMO.They provide 2 years of replacement protection on each of there services and 24*7 online support. Even You Can Try their Services. Visit QQSUMO Website or search QQSUMO on Google.

Thanks for the sharing the article.Six months back I started using Instagram and I wanted followers on my
profile but I used to get one or two followers in a week and sometimes none at
all. For the love I have for Instagram I started searching for best automation
tool for Instagram and as a result I found wizboost com. Wizboost is
by far the best tool that someone can ever use for automating their likes,
commenting and followers and it can even unfollow too.

Thank you for the article! The advice is really good. But I think that at the moment even profiles with the most beautiful photos are used by bots. Even I use bot bigbangram.com, with it I have real followers.

Finding the best time to post is very important because time is everything. If you are looking for more methods to get followers on Instagram from GetInstaFollow.com. They have a huge user group, people follow each other on Instagram and will also like each other’s Instagram posts.

Some people use apps to get more followers faster.
It’s good for businesses like my brother does with instanobel.com as I
remember. But they need to gain audience faster to start making money. My
opinion is if you really want to get more followers as fast as possible such
tips are pretty good for you

Sorry, I’ve gotta call BS on some of this. Instagram is a numbers game and the @linandjirsa feed is a great example of this. It gets 500-1k likes per picture because it has 42k followers. It has 42k followers because they’re FOLLOWING 7k people. And this is where the numbers break down and reveal the truth about some feeds. Why is an account with 42k followers only getting 500 likes and 5 comments per picture? It’s either A) because they paid for ghost followers, or B) they subscribe to the smoke & mirrors approach of “follow for follow” and most of their followers are also following 7k other people which makes it impossible to engage with the feeds you follow. There’s no way somebody who is following 7k people is keeping up with everything in their feed, which means that as a follower you are not engaging, or even ever seeing, hardly anything from those you follow. Well it works both ways, which is why you can only eke out 500 likes from 42k followers. Nobody seems to write about that part.

A few things to keep in mind: 1) we can’t control what accounts follow us .. so if someone was using services like instagress and followed us based on the hashtags we used, then yes they are not likely to interact with our content and will drive our follower count up but keep our engagement low 2) the IG algorithm is not showing our images to all of our followers 3) we have never bought followers – and would not be dumb enough to do so because of the risks involved 4) you are correct in that you can’t engage with 7K followers AND following others with interests similar to your target audience is a growth strategy

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